Un chien Andalou (1929)
(YouTube Streaming, July 2019) Often mentioned as a classic of surrealism, Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s Un chien Andalou can be a tough watch. It starts on the single most unpleasant note imaginable, with a succession of two shots suggesting a woman’s eye being cut open with a straight razor. (If you look closely at the second shot, you can see it’s a dead farm animal’s eye, but most people don’t look that closely … and it’s not much of an improvement.) Old-school surrealism was extremely violent by design, and the following scenes certainly give into that tradition what with ants drawling out of a hole in a man’s hand, someone getting hit by a car, amputation, a disappeared mouth and so on. Do not try to make sense of the film, which -at best—follows a twisted kind of dream logic and at worse is just trying to get a rise out of an audience craving narrative. Some of it can be very funny (such as the title cards boldly announcing things like “Sixteen years later” without it having any sort of bearing) and some of it quite horrifying. Un chien Andalou does feel like a far more modern film than a 1929 title, mostly due to pre-Code levels of eroticism and ultra-violence. Paradoxically, it’s a large part (aside from the pedigree of the creators) why it’s still worth a (well prepared) look today. At least it’s barely more than twenty minutes long, meaning that it will soon be over even if you don’t enjoy it.
